USA: The coming of the Cold War
With the war won, the United Nations was created amid much hopeful rhetoric, and the Marshall Plan was set up to speed the recovery of Europe, a goal in which it was far more successful than its predecessors 25 years earlier. However, as Winston Churchill announced in Missouri in 1946, an "Iron Curtain" had descended upon Europe, and Joseph Stalin was transformed from ally to enemy almost overnight.The ensuing Cold War lasted for over four decades, at times fought in ferocious combat in scattered corners of the globe, and during the intervals amassing colossal resources in the stockpiling of ever more destructive arsenals. Some of its ugliest moments came in its earliest years; Truman was still in office in 1950 when war broke out in Korea . A dispute over the arbitrary division of the Korean peninsula into two separate nations, North and South, soon turned into a stand-off between the US and China (with Russia, in theory at any rate, lurking in the shadows). Two years of a bloody stalemate ended, with little to show for it, except that Truman had by now been replaced by the genial General Eisenhower , the latest war hero to turn president.
The Eisenhower years have come to be synonymous with bland complacency. Once Senator Joseph McCarthy , the "witch-hunting" anti-Communist scourge of the State Department and Hollywood, had finally discredited himself by attacking the army as well, the country lapsed into a wilful suburban stupor. Great social changes were starting to take shape, however. World War II had introduced vast numbers of women and members of ethnic minorities to the potential rewards of factory work, and it had shown many Americans the lifestyle that was attainable in other parts of their own country. The development of a national highway system, and a huge increase in automobile ownership, encouraged people to pursue the American Dream wherever they chose, and this led to another mass migration of blacks from the rural South to the cities of the North. The cities of California entered a period of exponential growth, with the aeronautical industries of Los Angeles in particular attracting thousands of prospective workers.
It was also during the 1950s that television reached every home in the country. Together with the LP record, it created an entertainment industry that seemed designed to promote mass conformity but which swiftly showed itself capable of addressing the needs of consumers who had previously been barely identified. Youth culture burst into public prominence from 1954 onwards, with Elvis Presley's recording of That's Alright Mama appearing within a few months of Marlon Brando's moody starring role in On the Waterfront and James Dean's in Rebel Without a Cause .
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